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AND this is not propaganda??....as it is attempting to set a "narrative" that simply does not exist and flies in the face of actual hardcore evidence and even recently UAF captured active duty Russian GRU recce team members inside eastern Ukraine and two FSB officers who had crossed into Ukraine illegally...

One has to ask why did he state this and for whom??

Shawn Steel (GOP national committeeman) :
@realDonaldTrump doesn't need to bring up Ukraine with Putin, as Putin has backed out of Ukraine"

Russian 6Ds Propaganda Principles

Distort....Distract...Deflect....Dismiss....ALL designed to create Doubt and Distrust...

30h Mech Bde has been in the thick of the fighting since it began in 2014.....

In 2014 they were fighting with little to no new equipment against well equipped Russian active duty armored forces......

Now they are well equipped and considered to be one of the best combat UAF units equal to anything on the US side now....after three years of ongoing and constant combat operations...the 71st Mech right behind them on the combat quality scale....

Overall UAF has reached a combat level that even Russian mercenary commanders admit can defeat them head to head if it were not for 100,000 Russian troops near Ukrainian borders....and this even though the mercenaries have had extensive Russian training and are equipped with modern Russia equipment....

To OUTLAW 09 RE: UAF

30h Mech Bde has been in the thick of the fighting since it began in 2014.....

In 2014 they were fighting with little to no new equipment against well equipped Russian active duty armored forces......

Now they are well equipped and considered to be one of the best combat UAF units equal to anything on the US side now....after three years of ongoing and constant combat operations...the 71st Mech right behind them on the combat quality scale....

Overall UAF has reached a combat level that even Russian mercenary commanders admit can defeat them head to head if it were not for 100,000 Russian troops near Ukrainian borders....and this even though the mercenaries have had extensive Russian training and are equipped with modern Russia equipment....

Certainly, the Ukrainian Armed Forces outnumber the separatist forces 1.5-2:1, assuming that we are only counting Ukraine’s active and deployed forces. However, it would be a bridge too far to claim that the 30th or 71st Bdes are “equal to anything on the US side”, or even to the Russians.

With regard to the development of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, here is what Franklin Holcomb at the Institute for the Study of War had to say in December 2016:

The Ukrainian armed forces have been partially restructured and strengthened in the face of this constant pressure, enough to stabilize the front lines for a time. They require significantly more support of all varieties, however, if they are to stop the advance of Russia and its proxies permanently, to say nothing of reversing the armed occupation of Ukrainian territory.

These forces still suffer from a lack of modern equipment and from an incompletely reformed organizational structure. Ukrainian front-line soldiers have learned much from the protracted conflict and now outmatch separatist forces operating in eastern Ukraine.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine are in the midst of a transition from the Soviet structure on which they were based and remain inefficiently-organized. Ukrainian front-line troops also lack standardized modern weaponry. Ukraine’s defense sector remains highly productive, but the Armed Forces of Ukraine does not have the modern weaponry necessary to allow them to counter Russian military intervention. Ukrainian Ground Forces will be unable to provide a true deterrent to offensive action by regional aggressors until these problems are addressed.

The Ukrainian Air Force’s high vulnerability to even limited deployments of Russian anti-air systems raises serious concerns about its ability to fight against a conventional combined arms force.

The Ukrainian Navy is currently the weakest navy in the Black Sea region. It is weaker than the Russian Black Sea Fleet as well as the navies of NATO members Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria, though is slightly stronger than the Georgian Coast Guard.

Ukraine’s Special Operations Command is still nascent, however, and Ukrainian special operations forces have yet to become a fully mature force.

Igor Sutyagin at the Royal United Services Institute assessed the presence of Russian forces operating in Donbas. The strength of Russian forces in Donbas rose from roughly 3,500 to 6,500 around August 2014 to 9,000 to 11,000, around December 2014 through February 2015. However, based upon estimates of insurgent strength, Russian forces never comprised more than 25% of the total forces arrayed against Ukraine, although they obviously were the best-equipped and trained.

Russia’s active presence in Donbas – as opposed to deployments along Ukraine’s borders and in Crimea – has always been a situation of water sloshing over the sides of a saucepan, rather than being dumped. Russia has fought the war with at least one hand tied behind its back. If the other hand were brought out, whether by way of full deployment or combined-arms (i.e. airpower), the Ukrainians would find themselves in all sorts of trouble to paraphrase Joe Rogan.

Prior to the Russian annexation of Crimea and the emergence of conflict in the east of Ukraine, the Ukrainian military were engaged in a process of military reform. This process was influenced heavily by the so-called ‘transformation paradigm’: a model of war articulated by the US that identified future military effectiveness with such concepts as agility, concentration, digitisation, and information. However, by 2014 it had become increasingly evident that the Ukrainian government had been trying to adopt a model of warfare that was beyond the capability of the Ukrainian state to deliver and which did not fit the reality of the war that Ukraine’s armed forces actually had to face. By 2015 it had become increasingly clear that the war in the east was not the rapid and mobile warfare that the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) had been conceptually and structurally preparing for, at least in theory, since 2006. In my article, I examine how the UAF have been forced to adopt a new model of military reform – resuscitation – a process of recreating older approaches which, in the context of actual combat in the Donbas, is better suited to the nature of the conflict than continued attempts to replicate aspects of the transformation model. The key aspects of the resuscitation of the UAF have included: the reintroduction of mass; organic ‘bottom-up’ innovation; and the utilisation of what were, in effect, pre-modern methods of mobilisation.

Highlights:

The UAF reversed the process of professionalization as these forces were too small, and the war in Donbas has highlighted the need for mass, reserves and stockpiles. Conscription was reintroduced in May 2014 to raise the UAF to a strength of 250,000

Organic and bottom-up innovation has been key to Ukraine’s war effort. Civil society networks have crowd-funded and delivered funding and supplies to frontline UAF units

Some of the most effective Ukrainian units were militias raised by oligarchs, and these 50 volunteer battalions of ~10,000 fighters played a vital role in containing the separatists through 2014 and 2015, despite being under-equipped and trained

Was it the right decision for so many militaries to try to realize a transformation toward an American approach to warfighting that was overly ambitious?

In addition, can we presume that the conditions of war will allow us to fight the way we want to? The nature of the Donbas conflict poses questions about the resilience of many European militaries. Will militaries designed for short wars of maneuver be able to cope with protracted attrition?

Azor....will respond here vs the previous article which IMHO does not really say much other than someone wrote it.....

1. From 2006 to 2013 I trained over 41 BCT Command Staffs both at the National Training Center Ft. Erwin and or here in Germany....

2. At no time were any of those 41 BCTs capable of fighting tank on tank and using artillery in a 1990s style of fire and maneuver.

3. Artillery units were largely being used for personnel backfill...meaning either in Iraq or AFG they were prison guards, convoy escorts etc....but never did fill the role of artillery units firing in support

4. Fire and maneuver typical for the US Army from 1990 largely no longer existed and tank units had literally lost their edge in this area...at the height of say 1990 a US tank was trained to handle up to 24 moving targets in a kill chain before maybe underline maybe they would be hit themselves...then it was on to another 24 targets...in 2013 they were lucky to acquire three...in a kill chain before being hit.

It is just now that the NTC has finally and fully shifted to exercising Russian combat doctrine in the deserts of California and where it is again tank on tank with artillery in fire support.....

For the first time this writer is starting to get close to the acutal UAF issues and initial problems......

BUT a small reminder....both the 30th and 72 Mech Bdes in 2014.....using fire and maneuver had moved literally into a position of actually militarily defeating Girkin and his rag tage army of so called separatists and had established fire bases actually along the Russian Ukrainian borders. If you remember from 2014....all my posts will back this up....it was only through extensive Russian cross border artillery and rocket strikes that beat UAF back from the border areas and it was a FULL scale Russian active duty military invasion of Donbass in 2014 that "literally" saved Girkin and his rag tags.

Social media was reporting those cross border ongoing attacks...MSM largely ignored them BTW.....

AND yes it was the volunteer BNs using whatever weapons they could get their hands on that beat back elements of Girkin in heavy fighting especially in the Mariupol and Odessa areas....AND it took regular Russian Army units to beat the volunteers and regular UAF in Debaltseve in 2015....and it was Azor that took back portions of the Mariupol front lines and held it repeatedly against heavy Russian regular army attacks....

And it was the Cyborgs a mixture of volunteer and regular UAF that held the Donetsk airport for over 272 days of heavy fighting....that gave UAF time to reorg, refit and reposition.....BTW that defence of a single surrounded point was longer than Stalingrad.....

The author is right the UAF is attempting to balance a NAO style concept with the war of trenches, heavy arty strikes, heavy EW and constant GRU raids and recce....seen now daily in eastern Ukraine....almost like 1917....in some aspects.

NOT even the US Army would have during the 2016 and now in the ongoing trench fighting have held their own as has never been trained to fight in radio silence under heavy artillery and rocket strikes and without a large scale fire and manuever element in the fighting....in depth positional fighting is not the US style....

Two things have come out of the fighting.....

1. UAF has developed a unique style of defense in depth that has largely stymied all Russian attempts to break through their defensive lines and UAF has taken ever slowly territory back under control along the Minks line

2. UAF has built up via private medical training and massive US and NATO field medical training and recovery of wounded and how to evac wounded while under heavy fire without copters......a solid capacity to do all of this and fight at the same time ....lowering the high wounded loss rates in 2014 and 2015......even the US has never really exercised that piece before 2016...

The building of an immediate treatment and rapid medical recovery capacity has gone a long way in stabilizing the UAF personal views on survival under heavy fire. and has given UAF a mental resilience that is missing in the Russian separatist units...

Lastly what the separatists cannot match nor have been able to match is the troop leadership in the BNs and below and lately greater improvement at the Bde levels...this is exactly where you will find a majority of the separatist units having even now Russian active duty staff officers.....

So again based on actual experience with US BCTs the 30th and 72th are equal to some of the better US BCTs in the current fighting style of eastern Ukraine....

Example, in Iraq a BCT main base would panic if the insurgents fired a rocket barrage or mortar barrage of say three rounds.....and what does UAF see daily and under fire from up to 152mm artillery....

Even in VN our camp was use to 700-1300 rocket and mortar rounds per day and yet we continued with ease combat operations..and all we had was a helmet.....and no body armor.....the current US Army units are nowhere close to understanding how to operate under these conditions...they are learning but until they get hit with the real thing it is only an "exercise"....

Reference SOF, while they were never armed and equipped as their NATO and US counterparts...they participation in the early fighting has largely remained unknown....but their recce abilities were in heavy use during 2014 through 2016....

You hear even from US SOF their surprise in how good UAF SOF actually is vs. what the image of them is out there....it has been the excellent UAF SOF counter Spetsnaz operations that many do not hear about...that led to the latest elimination of an entire Russian active duty Spetsnaz team...5 captured six killed.....

I still go back to the original statement by one of the respected separatist commanders who is still alive since 2014...the UAF would walk over us if not for the Russian army on the border....

To Outlaw 09 RE: UAF Lessons

I actually referenced two articles on Ukraine’s military: one at ISW and one at DID. If your issue is with the latter, note that it refers to the full report in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies that is behind a USD $45 per article paywall. Did you think the article would reveal the recipe to the secret sauce without a credit card?

No disputes here with respect to U.S. ground forces training and equipping since U.S. doctrine became “Iraq First”. The very fact that high-end F-22 production was drastically curtailed in favor of low-end MRAP vehicles during this same period, is very, very telling. Our issues with Obama aside, he does deserve credit for steering the military back toward high-end warfighting against peer and near-peer competitors despite harsh budget cuts, and for appointing officials such as Carter, Work and Roper to the DOD, who were focused on the next (3rd) qualitative offset.

However, the Army is part of the Joint Force. Whatever its organic weaknesses, it is backed by the best air and sea-based precision-strike power in the world. The Army is now promoting "Multi-Domain Battle" and attempting to take the lead in deterring Russian aggression against NATO’s eastern flank, both in order to preserve its access to funding and influence, despite being the biggest pig at the trough from 2001-on.

I read the RAND study on Russia occupying the Baltic republics within 36-60 hours, and it made the fatal error of ignoring those U.S. assets outside EUCOM. Assuming only 40% of naval and strategic bomber assets facing the Atlantic (due to the Pacific Pivot), assuming current readiness levels, and assuming the seven-day notice from the original RAND scenario, the U.S. should be able to utterly saturate Russian A2/AD assets in the Baltic region with cruise missiles from a standoff range, even before engaging with B-2s or calling in other NATO assets. Yet, the U.S. Army would have us believe that it needs armored divisions in Eastern Europe to defend NATO.

It must be said that wherever American strategic bombers, attack submarines or cruise missile submarines can get within 1,000 km of in under seven days, there already exists an A2/AD zone in being, to paraphrase Lord Torrington. It must be further said, that despite the consternation that Desert Storm provoked in Moscow and Beijing, every aspect of that campaign’s execution should have indicated that it was not a model to be applied to Russia or China. Why? Because of the sheer scale of the commitment despite Iraq's weaknesses, and fear of failure. Yet despite Sino-Russian efforts over the past twenty years to counter American warfighting, neither would be able to “bite and hold” a piece of territory nominally defended by the U.S. without relying upon forces operating within their own borders. Again, we return to the Cold War maxim that a limited war cannot be assumed.

As I recall, it was mainly the volunteer battalions that overcame the insurgents in the Summer of 2014, who were beginning to lay siege to the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, and who were driven back by regular Russian forces at Ilovaisk and other points. Many volunteer battalion commanders heaped scorn on Kiev for not supporting their battalions when they were encircled at Ilovaisk. The struggle for Donetsk Airport may have lasted longer than Stalingrad, but then again Operation Enduring Freedom has lasted longer than World Wars I and II combined, and American involvement in the Vietnam War lasted more than twenty years...

As for the U.S. military, it is being trained to fight blind and deaf, but still as a Joint Force. The fighting in Donbas is a very unique way of war, given that Ukraine has no combined-arms capabilities and that Russia wants to maintain as much plausible deniability as possible. I highly doubt that if U.S. soldiers without insignia appeared in South Ossetia, the Russians would not engage them in full-scale and combined-arms fighting. To regard the Donbas War as a model to follow would be sheer folly, and play into Russian tactical and operational unpredictability. However, there are lessons to be learned, such as how to survive massive bombardment without communications and therefore fire support.

Lastly, the term “Spetsnaz” is not necessarily a mark of quality, given that most units with that designation are nowhere near “Tier One” or the “Special Mission Units” of the U.S.

MH17 three years later: What have we learned?

Today, we are releasing a report summarizing all major open source evidence surrounding the downing of MH17 in an easy-to-read 73-page survey. This report is broken into thirteen chapters, summarizing the circumstances that led to the downing of MH17, information on the Buk missile launcher that downed the passenger plane, a summary of alternative scenarios regarding the downing, and other essential areas of information.

US 'may send arms' to Ukraine, says new envoy

"Defensive weapons, ones that would allow Ukraine to defend itself, and to take out tanks for example, would actually to help" to stop Russia threatening Ukraine, Mr Volker said in a BBC interview.

"I'm not again predicting where we go on this, that's a matter for further discussion and decision, but I think that argument that it would be provocative to Russia or emboldening of Ukraine is just getting it backwards," he added.

Lessons from the Russian Front via Defense One

Thanks to a "lurker" this Ebook is available, behind a registration wall, dated August 2017 (23 pgs) and the blurb says:

The 2014 Russian Invasion of Ukraine altered not only the future of Eastern Europe but the course of modern warfare as well. Since then, Ukraine has become a deadly testing ground for new battlefield tactics and technologies. This eBook takes a look at Russia's new ways of war with the hope that it can help next-generation military leaders understand and deter a rising new threat to Western peace and security.